Monday, 3 June 2013

GEORGE BELLOWS: MODERN AMERICAN LIFE

I had meant to write
about George Bellows right after I saw the exhibition a few weeks
ago—now there's only a week left for you to get to Royal Academy
and do the same, because it is a superlative show that reveals
Bellows as a pivotal, and major, artist, and raises the question of
where he might have gone had he not died at only 42.

The response in the
local press was somewhat lukewarm. Most reviews concentrated on the
work for which Bellows is best known, his boxing paintings,
particularly Stag At Sharkey's (1909), which is a magnificent
work, its power intensified in person and close up. Bellows himself
was more interested in the atmosphere around the ring than the
dynamic scene he paints inside it, and by the time he produced an oil
of Dempsey and Firpo (1924) his perspective has changed
considerably—Firpo is a figure of heroism in the centre of a more
static crowd—and the lights up in the rafters look on like the
staring eyes of jealous dieties. To miss the difference between these
two approaches, which span virtually the whole of Bellows' serious
career, is to miss his growth, and luckily the RA also shows
Preliminaries To The Big Bout (1916), White Hope (1921—the
Jess Willard/Jack Johnson fight) in which the battlers exude
tiredness, and the triumphant Johnson seems seriously out of shape,
and an earlier version, Dempsey Through The Ropes which
focuses on the power of Firpo's follow-through.

This might make Bellows
appear a genre painter, but he is far more than that, though again
the British reviews seemed to care more about what he wasn't—namely
an Impressionist. Yes you can see the influence of Manet, and
Whistler, but to call him a failed Impressionist is to miss the
point. Even Richard Dorment, who didn't miss the point and wrote of
Bellows' relationship to Robert Henri and the Ash Can school (and
linked it perceptively to Sickert and Camden Town) somehow managed to
transform Bellows' contemporary John Sloan into John Soane! But
seeing Bellows in terms of Impressionism is missing, most crucially,
the point of the exhibition's subtitle, 'Modern American Life', and
fails to put Bellows into his proper place, which I think of as being
a powerful central figure in the early American Twentieth Century,
linking the wide spectrum of styles that were growing in the hothouse
of New York City throughout the early part of the century, right up
to the Abstract Expressionists after World War II.

I started by thinking
in terms of Bellows as a touchstone between the Ash Can painters, and
their commitment to urban reality, and American Impressionism, which
was a late-blooming thing which, pace Bellows' reviewers, hasn't
always received enough credit for what it is, as opposed to what it
is not. But the deeper you consider Bellows' work, the more links to
his contemporaries you can make. Some early paintings, like 42
Kids (1907) recall Eakins, but his
figures can also seem like children's book illustrations, almost
stick figures. You can see Sloan in
Election Night Times Square (1906), and there is no denying
affinity with the Ash Can artists, which is no surprise as he studied
under Robert Henri, alongside Edward Hopper and Rockwell Kent

Bellows'
second-best known works are probably his studies around the
excavation of the Pennsylvania Station, in which New York City sits
atop some primordial force, fires coming from within the earth, with
the few human figures looking beaten down, and the lights of the city
street pale against the workers' floodlights. This is a different
sort of look at urban reality, one which is partly mythic and partly
impressionist, recalling Whistler in its use of distinct lighting.
You can see some of Hopper in the buildings in the background of
Excavation At Night (1908), and you can also see Bellows'
influence on later artists like Charles Demuth or Charles Sheeler,
who celebrated the finished product of such excavation. It's a
different dynamic to the Impressionists; yes, you can see the steam
from a train while looking down Riverside Park in Rain On The
River (1908) and you can sense the intrusion of the machine age,
but Bellows is working at a time when rail is commonplace, and in a
milieu where escape from New York is not the grail it was in Paris.

While Cliff Dwellers
(1913), with its metaphorical title, can be seen in a genre context,
it's a big step forward to New York (1911), a city scene which blends
a number of New York squares into one, and populates it with a more
fashionable sort of Lowry crowd. There are elements on abstract, say
on the wagon pulling itself across the foreground. Way off in the
distance, between two skyscrapers and almost crowning a third, is a
cold-looking cloud, a kind of gateway to Bellows' most brilliant New
York studies—painting after painting of the city frozen by winter,
held in thrall to mother nature. His winter is brilliant
sun-reflecting white and deep ice blue, and the wild spaces always
extend right up to and even past the border of civilisation. It is as
if he is returning the city to its proper place in the grand scheme
of things, even when, as in Love Of Winter (1914--below left) it's only
the sight of the pristine hills glowering in the background. There
are elements of Rockwell Kent in some of the painting he did outside
the city, in Maine (where Robert Henri summered, and which would be
important for artists as diverse as Hopper and John Marin), for
example (Forth and Back, 1913) which stands in comparison to
Blue Snow, The Battery (1910) to remind us of Bellows' vision
of a New York that remained part of unfettered nature. This is
obvious in North River (1908), with its high point of view
looking past the snow, past the boats on the river, to the seeming
wilds of the Palisades.

By contrast, Summer
Night Riverside Drive (1909 below right) features lurking darkness and two
bits of impressionistic light, including reflections off the river,
while figures in the park look for privacy—a topic made plainer,
but with less striking effects, in Strugglers Solitude (1913).
By the start of World War I, I think you can point to Bellows as
already reaching elements of synthesis between the forces in modern
painting. The sheer scope of the works I've mentioned were produced
in the space of eight years, by which time Bellows was one of New
York's leading artists.

But he was also part of
a group called The Lyrical Left, and by 1911 was on the board of The
Masses. His drawings for the paper, along with other lithographs done
for more upscale magazines like Harper's Weekly and Collier's are
revealing because they show where Bellows channelled the social
awareness we saw in his paintings. This becomes particularly evident
after the start of the Great War, in his dramatic drawings in the
series Disasters Of War, which deliberately recall Goya, in a
magazine illustrationof the murder of British nurse Edith
Cavell, and in his five paintings titled War Scenes, which were
inspired by the 1915 Bryce Report on German atrocities. These are
pure propaganda, pure emotion, as powerful in their way as his boxing
work, but with a broader focus. They reminded me immediately of John
Singer Sargent's Gassed, which
was completed in 1919 and hangs in the Imperial War Museum. There is
a palpable sense of shock in both painters, as if they cannot totally
comprehend the full horror of what they are painting.

He
was more ironic and cutting but less shocked perhaps in works like
Benediction In Georgia, Electrocution, and Dance In A Madhouse, all
done in 1916-17, where convicts being preached to or executed don't
look saved or blessed, and the mad look anything but. The last looks
forward to the work of Jack Levine, in its chaotic beauty. There's
an interesting boxing cover Bellows did for the New Masses, and two
pages of contrasting illustrations: John Sloan's portrait of the
upper crust on an ocean liner on one, Bellows' riverfront scene of
meagre food in the other.

His
later magazine work, if anything, is more emotionally powerful. His
Billy Sunday (1923), a
study of the fiery preacher whom he covered with John Reed, shows
Sunday with his fist cocked, like a boxer, the press in the front
rows like at a boxing match, and the crowd in expressions of fear,
shock, and wonder. The Law Is Too Slow
(1923) is a lithograph done for Century magazine, a black man being
burned beneath a hanging tree by men in masks. In a sense you get
the sense of a divide between this work and his painting, because by
this time he was concentrating on portraiture, and they are hugely
impressive portraits, which again recall Sargent.

Sargent
used to paint watercolours for his own experiment and amusement,
while concentrating on the portraits which earned him his acclaim and
living. Bellows may well have been painting his portraits as much for
their sense of safety, in the evident beauty he highlights in his
wife and daughters, his main subjects, as for anything else. At the
start of the exhibition, you see three of early portraits, done
1907-09. Frankie the Organ Boy stares
directly at the viewer with eyes almost bugged out. His
Nude Girl: Miss Leslie Hare does
suggest Manet, but her face, like Frankie's seems to be making a
statement, just slightly off a pose, perhaps indicating their
background in the streets. But the portrait of the laundry girl
Queenie Burnett (Little Girl In White) is
magnificent in its efforts to imbue her with an almost fairy-tale
royalty.

He
can be nearly as perfect as Sargent or Whistler in his portrait of Mr
and Mrs Philip Wise (1924)but there is something almost
reverential in Emma And Her Childrenwhich contrasts movingly with Emma At The Piano
(1914). In the latter, she is part of the balance of lovely objects
in an almost neo-impressionist way, while in the later work, the
figures are more carefully delineated, with more depth, but set
against an almost abstract background.

Finally,
there is The Picnic (1924)
with its Alice in Wonderland dreamlike quality, with his daughter
holding a jump rope and looking off into the Wonderland across the
Hudson River, while Bellows contemplates his fishing pole while his
wife stares into the picnic blanket. It's hard not to see that as
some sort of premonition of his departure from them; a burst appendix
would lead to his death from blood poisoning in January 1925.

One
gets the distinct impression that at the time of his death, Bellows
was possibly reassessing his artistic direction, and given the
variety of his earlier work, and the contrast between his
illustration and painting in his later, I wonder how significant that
abstract background in Emma And Her Children
is. Because I see another link here, between Bellows and the Abstract
Expressionists. Bellows was the most masculine of painters; like
Franz Kline he had been a sports star who turned to painting, and
like Kline his work conveys physical dynamism. With America, and
American art, in flux in the Roaring Twenties, and about to entire
the Depression, Bellows' future, looked at retrospectively, almost
shimmers with possibility. But what he left behind, as evidenced in
this exhibition, is satisfying enough.

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